Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Bounties were part of a cash system paid to individuals as an enticement to enlist in the military. This was frequently employed during the Civil War, and is said by many historians to have been a system that was widely abused. Nevertheless, after war many former soldiers signed up to get their bounty payments.

The evidence of payment of bounties to the US Colored Troops varies from regiment to regiment and also from state to state. In some places bounty records can be found on the state level in state archival records. In other cases such records have yet to emerge at all. And finally a few have been surfacing as researchers are discovering them, in various collections from repositories, to the un-indexed records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands.

While recently going through a miscellaneous reel of Freedman's Bureau microfilm form Arkansas, several pages containing the names of soldiers from various regiments of the US Colored Troops. These were apparently in a ledger of books from the Little Rock Field Office of the US Colored Troops. Since these ledgers are name-rich and contain names of soldiers, the pages are reproduced for readers here.

Note the columns at the top of each ledger page:

Ledgers reflecting names and regiments of soldiers and the amount paid to each soldier.